Asiana Airlines flight 214 crash caused by Boeing planes being 'overly complicated'

[unhappycamper]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/asiana-airlines-flight-214-crash-caused-by-boeing-planes-being-overly-complicated-9562331.html



Safety board calls for Boeing to 'develop and evaluate' the way its fleet's control systems are automated

Asiana Airlines flight 214 crash caused by Boeing planes being 'overly complicated'
Adam Withnall
Wednesday 25 June 2014

The probe into the fatal crash of Asiana Airlines flight 214 on its landing in San Francisco last year has concluded that the Boeing 777’s overly complex control systems were partially to blame.

US investigators called on the manufacturer to make changes to the increasingly complicated automated controls which, they claimed, pilots no longer “fully understand”.

The inquiry into the crash, which killed three Chinese teenagers and injured nearly 200 people, was concluded yesterday by the US National Transportation Safety Board.

But the board was far from exonerating the Asiana pilots over their involvement in the accident.

Acting chairman Chris Hart said that, between them, the three veteran pilots were found to have committed between 20 and 30 errors in their final approach to San Francisco International – varying from minor to highly significant.

[NV Whino]

1. I call bullshit on this ruling

The plane may be complicated, but the fault lay squarely with the crew.

There has been discussion previously (with trof, I think) about flight training in Asian countries and, more specifically, how Asian pilots learn.

I recently had a discussion with a retired Air Force pilot who said the exactly same thing. Asian pilots are trained to learn by rote memory. It leaves them ill prepared to deal with anything out of the ordinary. In addition, there is the strict higherarchy of command, which made the third crew member wait too long to alert the pilots to the problem.

[PearliePoo2]

3. I agree with you.

These pilots can recite manuals from memory, front to back until the cows come home, but add an element of the unexpected and they are lost.
They don't know how to fly an airplane from the seat of their pants or their gut.
They need to climb in a Cessna 152 and practice take-offs, landings and stalls all day long until they get the basics.
Basics...as in learn to fly the fucking plane.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. That's not exactly what the NTSB said.

This article makes it sound like the cause of the accident was the complexity of the flight management system, but that's not what the NTSB concluded (if that were the case these things would have been crashing regularly, and they haven't been). They placed the blame squarely on inadequate pilot training by the airline and the crew's over-reliance on automated systems they didn't completely understand. The panel did recommend a review of ofaspects the 777's automatic flight control system: "Convene a special certification design review of how the Boeing 777 automatic flight control system controls airspeed and use the results of that evaluation to develop guidance that will help manufacturers improve the intuitiveness of existing and future interfaces between flight crews and autoflight systems." However, the board's findings and recommendations were aimed primarily at crew training, not problems with the 777.

http://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/2014/asiana214/abstract.html